When you start a company you have this huge vision of what you’d love it to be. But you know you can’t start a marathon by focusing on the finish line. Get through the first mile, then get to 5 miles, then 10 and so on.

Almost four years ago when I start talking to Claire about really ramping up Appbot, we talked about how broad we wanted to go. We wanted to be able help product teams build better products by focussing on what their customers really wanted. But first we knew we had to focus, so we solved the problem for mobile app reviews first.

We’ve been lucky to pick up thousands of customers along the way, companies like Paypal, Microsoft, BMW and Twitter. So many of them asked us the same thing “when can we do this for our other feedback sources?”.

So we went out and found the best machine learning people we could and put them to work. It’s taken us 18 months and training models on hundreds of millions of records. We are so stoked with the results!

I’m so proud we have made it here. The team at Appbot, our data scientists, engineers, designers, marketing, everyone, are all so much smarter than me. There’s no way we could of achieved this without them.

I feel like we are 5 miles into our marathon, only 21.2 miles to go. But we are rehydrating and refuelling for 10 miles first.

Startups are a marathon was originally published in Appbot on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

]]>https://stories.appbot.co/feedback-driven-growth-a-process-for-sustainable-growth-9108001c60aa?source=rss----3cc6f977b822---4
https://medium.com/p/9108001c60aaTue, 20 Mar 2018 01:43:07 GMT2018-03-20T07:51:07.048ZEveryone wants a silver bullet for growth. We all look for that amazing “growth hack” that will instantly drop millions of new users into our products.

The tech press likes to talk about the unicorns who have hundreds of millions of users a year after launching. In reality most tech successful companies don’t have hockey stick growth, they have linear growth. They launch to very little fanfare, have very few customers in the early days and constantly think they won’t make it.

It’s rarely one specific thing you do will create a successful company. It’s the sum of hundreds or thousands of small things your team tick off their lists.

Appbot hasn’t been around as long as Basecamp. But we are still proud of our month by month growth. We decided early on to bootstrap and try and make a sustainable growth business. Each month on it’s own isn’t a lot to get excited about. But month by month it adds up into something sustainable and profitable.

Appbot monthly growth

We could easily keep a team of 20 busy, but we decided to grow within our means.

Helllppppp!

I get people reaching out to me with a very similar question. “I’ve launched my app and can’t get any users, what should I do?”

The truth is, for the vast majority of us, it takes a long time to be successful. It doesn’t happen in one Big Bang. You toil away for years seeing small improvements and then one day, years later, you look up and think “Wow, we made it, we are alive”.

My advice to them is always the same. “Delight the few users you have”. To do this you need to be able to work out how to delight them.

The one technique that I’ve found that works is something I call “Feedback Driven Growth”.

Essentially you are using user feedback to find two critical things:

What parts of your app or service are delighting people.

What pain points users have that you can solve better.

Early in the life of your product it’s easy to handle this manually and keep it all in your head. “Hey, that’s the fourth person this month that wants that feature”! As you grow and you hire support staff it becomes much harder to stay on top of everything.

Feedback Driven Growth

I’m a big believer in using user feedback as a way to improve your product and hence drive growth. It doesn’t mean blindly implementing everything users ask for. It’s about discovering recurring pain points and then innovating a solution that will delight.

When you break it down Feedback Driven Growth is a very simple process. Gather and read, analyse, classify, prioritise and iterate.

Gathering and Reading Feedback

I group feedback in two forms:

Unprompted feedback — this is always the best. App reviews, support tickets and emails are ideal. If the user has taken the time to give feedback unprompted you know it’s valuable.

Prompted feedback — Surveys, NPS, interviews and so on. These can be great, but are often misleading because people are compelled to think of answers to your questions.

Today's lesson about asking the right question to get meaningful data, brought to you by a 4 year old: Me: Should I put a banana in your lunch today? Him: Sure! They are healthy &amp; I'm supposed to bring healthy food. Me: Will you eat it? Him: Definitely not.

By default we will ask the first question, get the answer we want and yell out “we are validated!” and move on to building.

Back before commercialising Appbot I built a service that would easily add a support system to your mobile app. I sent out a survey to a bunch of developers I knew. They all loved the idea and couldn’t wait to use it. I built it and not one of them tried it out. But they did give me the answer I wanted so I left them alone quicker.

Analyse - Distilling Feedback into Pain Points

Often the feedback is actually a solution the customer has come up with. “I should be able to click on x to do y”. It may take a bit and back and forward with the customer to get what the real pain point is. Why do they want to do that? What are they trying to solve?

Here’s the thought process I go through for each ‘pain point’:

What’s the sentiment of the request, are they being positive or negative?

Does this fit into our goal as a company?

Is there a way it can be achieved with our existing tools?

Is it a problem a bunch of customers are facing?

Classify / Tag

Now you need to actually record it for your backlog.

I like to think of it in a few steps:

Is it a feature request, a bug report or a data improvement?

What section of your product does it fit in? For Appbot it might be sentiment, topics, integrations and so on.

Finally, what is the new pain point.

We then come up with a way to tag the request. For example a feature request about topics would be FR-Topics-New Feature Name a bug report in our Slack integration would be BR-Integrations-Slack-Bug Name.

This goes into our CRM against the customer where we can report on it and also find the customers to notify when it’s done.

Fix / Iterate

Fixing and iterating comes down to your own development process. But choosing what to build or fix next can be a tricky task.

Recently, I got the chance to experience an example of a text-book perfect interaction with a user through replying to a review.

In mid-March, I got a notification from Appbot that a user had reviewed my WordBoard app. I’m proud of the 4.9 star average WordBoard achieves in the US.

When I opened up the review, I saw it was a 4 star review and they had a feature request included as part of their feedback:

Keen to know more about their feature request, I decided to reach out to try and get more details. I tried to keep it concise as possible and take it offline.

“Thanks for the great review! We’d love to make it a 5 star review by getting a bit more info about the placeholder variables. Could you get in touch with us at support@bytesizeapps.net? Thanks!”

A few days later I was excited to get a response via email:

Although there are limits to being able to implement the feature they’ve requested for the time being, I’m glad I’ve now got an idea of how to grow my app when the tools are available.

It was great to hear the user expand on their idea, and talk out the possibilities.

And what do you know — they did exactly that!

Sure, the revised rating is awesome, but what makes me happiest is being to understand this user’s use case better now, and to know what can be done better in the product as time goes on.

As a big advocate of feedback driven growth, I will always value these kinds of interactions. Taking that one minute to reply and asking for more information might get you that insight to transform your app and make a user delighted.

About The Author

Stuart is co-founder and CEO @ Appbot. He is also an iOS developer who founded 7 Minute Workout (acquired by Wahoo Fitness), WordBoard and Discovr. You can connect with him on Twitter.

We then isolated apps that appeared in the chart consistently during the period — this left us with 38 apps to play with.

The results weren’t as we expected.

The impact on average star ratings across the board

Here’s what the average star rating for those 37 apps over the 7 month period looks like:

Average star rating Increase since iOS 11 (Unscaled)

This didn’t really tell us a lot. We may have been a bit optimistic.

So, we decided to zoom in on the y axis (stars) a little.

Average star rating Increase since iOS 11 (Scaled)

Ah-ha. What we saw here was a modest, but steady, increase over the course of 7 months. Whilst the change wasn’t as abrupt as we first expected, the closer look meant our hypothesis wasn’t completely without support.

Based on the average star rating of our whole data set, Top Free apps have seen an average increase of 0.12 stars or 3% since iOS 11.

Average raw stars and percentage increase since iOS 11

The increase is small, but for an app that is sitting at 3.9 stars, it’s enough to push it into 4 star territory, or a 4.9 to a 5.

The impact on rating count across the board

Now, we know that the average star ratings have grown in a modestly positive direction in the previous 7 months, but what about the overall ratings counts?

This was where we discovered that the REAL changes have occurred.

Rating count per day for apps in our sample since iOS 11

On the graph above we see an immense peak in rating count volume around the release of iOS 11, and a higher general rating count in the following months, compared to the time before iOS 11 was rolled out. That’s quite a spike!

Looking deeper at the data, the overall rating counts for the months at the start and the end of the time period show the following results:

Overall rating count comparison

That means the count of ratings in the last month of the period increased by 132% from the first month of the period (roughly a month before iOS 11 was released).

This has also translated to a average rating count increase, in this group alone, per app, of over 37,000 more ratings per month. Not bad at all!

So, our inkling about an overall improvement to ratings appeared to be correct — but what had prompted our hunch in the first place, and what did it mean for individual apps?

If this was happening for a couple of apps, surely it could be for more. This group could be what was caused the en masse increase that we saw earlier.

After some contemplation, this then lead us to our next question:

Did apps that used the new prompt get better results?

To answer that, we had to be able to spot them.

Who do we think implemented the prompt successfully?

Although it wasn’t clear who exactly implemented the ratings prompt successfully or at what time, there was a handful of apps we found that had enough rapid average star rating and rating count increase to presume the prompt was responsible.

Across the 7 month time period, we found 12 apps with an average star rating increase higher than the average star rating increase of 3.08% across the cohort:

We were blown away by the swift escalations in all of the star rating trend-lines at various points in the time since we assume the prompt was first introduced in the apps. Although the peaks could be as a result of changes to the apps themselves in some instances, it’s a fairly big coincidence if that is the case in all instances.

So, have star ratings really gone up since iOS 11?

Based on the data above, it appears that ratings (both average stars and counts) are indeed improving for the better since iOS 11, largely, we suspect, thanks to the implementation of the native ratings prompt by many developers.

If you’re going to give it a go, think about where your prompt is placed in the app. The prompt below was received after completing a successful complete activity in the app, so why not follow suit and punctuate a success or milestone in your app with the prompt — you may just skyrocket your ratings!

My job is to help app developers succeed with their product, and I speak to dozens of them every day.

One of the most common questions I get asked by those whose apps are struggling to get traction is simply:

“How can I get more downloads?”

Often, when I take a look at their app and the reviews users are leaving, it seems like the problem comes back to a lack of honest pre-build research.

That said, it’s not always easy to know what to think about when first starting to build the product.

So, before you create the app that’s been stewing in your imagination, ask yourself these two simple questions first:

1) Is it doing anything different?

If you’re trying to be the new Instagram, Spotify, or Netflix you really, truly need to consider whether what you’re creating is actually different, unique, or whether it is simply reinventing the wheel.

2) Are people actually going to use it?

Alright, so your idea is original. Awesome! Do you know if anyone will actually want to use this app? Are you aware of a demand for what you’ve created? If you have a beta of the app, have you tested it with a target audience to ensure it’s worthwhile? A little research goes a long way.

“Don’t be a buzzkill, why does it matter?”

I should be clear that this isn’t to stifle your creativity — it’s one thing creating apps to flex your skills and get yourself comfortable with coding.

It’s another thing putting the app out in the market, wanting people to use your app, and especially wanting to make money off of it.

2) The flooded market

There’s nothing worse than seeing apps drown because they’re competing in a space they never had a chance in. Crowding the stores with an app trying to get in on a market that is heavily dominated and fairly content is fairly futile if you’re not careful.

3) The users

Surely you know the feeling: there’s really nothing worse than downloading an unoriginal, poorly designed, or altogether unusable app. You don’t want to annoy the very people you’ve created the product for. Plus, your users won’t be patient for long if they’re not happy.

Don’t be discouraged

It’s so important to be circumspect and mindful before powering ahead with an idea to ensure those things don’t happen, and so you don’t lose any of your hard-earned money.

The world is full of rich and exciting apps, and we need more of them.

Historically, I didn’t really care about leaving reviews and ratings in the app stores. Why would I? The people that make apps are going to do what they want regardless of what I say, right?

EH, wrong.

I’m not saying this applies to every app developer out there, there are some that simply don’t care about their users’ opinions.

However, as I’ve discovered, the majority do truly care and are reliant upon feedback from their users.

In fact, it’s surprising just how eagerly app developers are actively seeking comment from users to help them improve their products.

You can see evidence of this all over the internet — there are many great posts like this one offering advice to developers on how to get more feedback. They’re even asking this question on forums, like Quora.

But what does this mean for you, the user? Why does it matter?

Well, as with democracy, although not perfect, so too it is with app development. Think of voting for your Head of State, or favourite performer on a singing show: you may think your vote doesn’t count, but every vote does count, and the results are ultimately reflective of the will of the people. With enough people like you sharing their thoughts, there is the chance to make a difference as a collective to improve what the output is like — and apps are just the same.

Is there something bugging you? Is there something you’d like to see built that would make your experience so much better? Take the time to leave a 20 second review, requesting the changes you’d like to see.

Developers all over the world are spending time and money aggregating all of these types of reviews (good and bad) they receive each day, reading through and analysing what their users want and how they’re feeling.

Some larger app developers have entire teams dedicated to working out what is making their customers tick, how to make their users happy, and what direction to take their app in as a result.

Learning this has really driven home to me that I need to take the time to give my feedback to the people who create the apps that I spend hours in daily, even if it’s just sending through a rating.

So, every now and then, I take a minute to do so — especially the apps that I love to use. I‘ve learned that it’s important to help great apps get noticed when there are so many in the stores, and also to give eagerly listening developers some acknowledgement of the positive impact their product is having if it really is doing so.

You’ve got the power to help create your everyday app experiences, so why not start sharing your voice now?

Growing up, what I had in general smarts couldn’t hide the fact that I had no real direction in life. It’s not that I didn’t want an awesome future, it’s just that I used to flit between aspirations and dream jobs like it was going out of fashion, and that probably hindered any chance of me ending up as that actor or neuropsychologist I wanted to be when I was 15 (yah, it’s a thing, Google it).

In the latter part of high school things started getting serious — in the classes around me, kids were doing physics, chem, econs, and so on, in preparations for the futures that they doggedly wanted.

I, on the other hand, had no idea.

I was fairly disengaged from learning, unmotivated, and tended to give up pretty easily if things got too difficult. Sitting in class my brain would often drift to my somewhat complex life outside of school, often consumed so much by other things without anything from the lessons resonating.

I felt pretty hopeless — I mean, these other kids just seemed to know what they wanted and go for it, and I felt I was being left behind, in the dirt, wasting the opportunities life had afforded me.

I didn’t know how to bridge the gap between me and them.

Nothing like an existential crisis at 16.

I was visiting the home of a relative, and their husband and I were talking at the kitchen table, discussing what I want to do after school.

I said that I had no idea, and that I didn’t even know where to start.

My worry was probably palpable.

He nodded, looked at me, and right away proceeded to explain how knowledge is a never-ending pursuit — so long as you never stop learning in whatever you do, then you at least have the chance to unlock your potential.

And then, he explained, once you’re done with the goals you originally set, you will need to keep going.

He said that there are people who reach their goals, or who think they’ve learned all they can, so they stop learning, and that is when they stagnate, and are overtaken in all aspects of their lives by people who’ve never stopped.

This blew my mind.

I mean, I had already understood that learning as a principle was important, and that it helps you get closer to your goals in life.

However, what stayed with me in his explanation was that it is a continual process that takes time to cultivate, and that you are never ever done with it, nor is it ever too late to pick up and start again.

You just gotta do it.

I began to understand that the greatest tool that I could use in my life to be successful was to keep learning, but for that, I needed to keep practicing the art of learning.

“Even if you don’t know what you want to do, at the very least go to uni and get a Bachelor of Arts (Liberal Arts) degree.”

This, from a man who co-founded a multimillion dollar IT company.

His logic was that I should capitalise on the fact that I was privileged enough to have access to such a resource, and at the very least, I would learn something, and something is better than nothing.

After our discussion, although it resonated with me, it didn’t fully sink in.

I continued to drift around my school days, taking random classes, and just aiming to have a chilled senior year.

I loosely took the advice I had gotten a couple of years earlier, applied to random uni courses with no idea what I wanted to do, and was accepted into a Bachelor of Arts.

I figured that playing to my strengths in the humanities meant I could get a job in something like writing, being a historian, or a book critic.

LOL.

If I’m honest, studying what I loved killed the passion. Even now, I can’t read a book without critiquing the hell out of it or watch a history show without questioning the authenticity of their research.

“Just keep learning, even if you hate it”, I said to myself as I took courses on Jane Austen, psychology, addiction studies, and the Roman empire simultaneously.

I mean, some of it was pretty cool, so I can’t totally knock it.

For the most part during uni I was aiming to be an English and History teacher (via postgraduate degrees) out of practicality, until I realised (in my final few months, mind you) that my patience with kids was and still is about as good as Tom’s is for Jerry.

At the end, I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts, in English and History, and was suddenly depressed at the absolutely 0 job prospects that awaited me — shock horror.

3 years at uni, 21 years old, a HECS debt (student loans), 50 random job applications later, and nothing to show for it — or so I thought.

A few weeks later, by serendipity, a local, suburban software company took up the services of my dad’s small family signage business, and he mentioned to them that I would be interested in doing unpaid experience in admin work if they had any going.

He had no idea what they did, but he thought they were lovely people.

“Software, what? I don’t think that’s up my alley”, I said, as I perused their website.

That said, they were willing to speak with me, and I was stoked for the offer.

I went in for an chat, and they said although they had no positions free, that I could hang around with them and see how they did things.

“Why not?”, I said, expecting to rock up in a couple of weeks time, unpaid, ready to just listen and learn how the business worked.

That night at 5:30pm I got a call from them, wanting to see if I was keen to do some data entry for a casual rate starting the following Monday.

“Hell yeah!”, I thought as I accepted her offer.

They were willing to give me a chance, and I was stoked to get a chance to keep busy.

I was willing to give anything a crack.

That must have left an impression.

That software company, as it turned out, was one that experienced the famed ‘hockey-stick growth’ just before I signed on, and were growing at a colossal rate.

I had no idea.

They needed someone who could learn fast, adapt, and was just willing to work hard, regardless of what tasks they threw their way.

That I could do.

I was in the right place at the right time, and by chance it ended up lighting an untameable fire in me.

3 days of data entry turned into a few weeks of paid admin work, that turned into a permanent role just a month after that. I progressed from Client Services, into the Marketing team a year later, and then on to Sales/Implementation coordination.

As it turns out, I had quickly fallen in love with SaaS, startups, and tech in general — that constant need to produce high quality work in that super fast-paced environment fuelled my curiosity and provided an outlet for my relentless need for new information.

That relative was also right about the degree —and in more ways than I expected.

When I was studying I learned how research thoroughly, exercise discipline, and to communicate well, all of these skills I needed in my new roles.

Funnily enough though, I think the greatest thing it taught me was to love a challenge. I had to fight against a lack of motivation, a lack of interest, and a lack of self confidence so much in the years during uni that when I was actually presented with a chance to prove my worth in the real world it spurred me on to put my head down and just try.

Don’t get me wrong, I was still a kid, and needed to be pulled into line from time to time. I was a bit of a rough diamond to say the least. BUT, they were willing to be patient and work with me whilst I grew up.

Just over 4 years on from that first interview, I’m sitting here writing this piece in my current job in a new company handling Customer Success (engagement and retention) in a global tech startup, where I work regularly assisting companies like Skyscanner, Disney, BMW, and more.

It’s also an industry I have no experience in — apps.

That’s pretty intimidating if I’m honest.

We’ve got a small but ridiculously intelligent team, who’re so talented in what they do and are so nifty with data that I sometimes simply can’t keep up.

I’m probably also the only major humanities nerd in a room full of STEM-wired humans.

I have no experience with apps.

I’ve never done Customer Success before.

I’m one of the youngest here.

I also always obsess about the services I offer to the talented organisations I work with — I want it to be up to the standards that they expect as marketers, product managers, customer service teams, and the like, in these large, multinational corporations.

No pressure.

But, I can’t undersell my value.

I’m actually doing a good job.

Whilst my formal training is a softer set of skills that humanities affords, that is what is needed when you’re dealing with human beings — the ability to communicate effectively with them, understand the thematic threads that underpin the needs of a client base, aside from just generally being interested in the human condition.

I’m very lucky that people throughout my career have seen those abilities, and that the companies I’ve worked in have embraced, challenged, and motivated me to keep refining those skills amongst the other new ones that I’m learning daily.

I think it is important to encourage our future generations in particular to still value the softer skills as we push in to a more and more STEM-focussed world. Both work hand-in-hand together.

However, my love of a challenge and other skills that I’ve learned have helped me problem-solve and achieve some pretty incredible stuff that is completely outside my comfort zone.

I’ve taught myself and been taught how to create ridiculous formulae in Google Sheets, run cohort analyses, and how to build a CRM from scratch. I’ve learned project management, sales forecasts, and more. These may not be my most natural of suits, but I’ll be damned if I can’t try and learn them all inside out.

I’m able to report to my team effectively. I’ve been able to understand what they’re working on too. Most importantly, I’ve been able to stretch myself to provide customers with regular support that they actually really find helpful.

It turns out, that after all my self doubt, our customers are pretty happy and retention looks pretty good.

That’s what matters anyways, right?

Truthfully, I consider myself extremely lucky to have not only been afforded the chance to receive an education like I had (it can be so easy to forget how many are without the opportunity or means to receive what we often take for granted), but also to have been able to continually apply those skills.

The real key here, though, is that even with those benefits I never stopped seeking personal growth and nor do I never ever plan to. I aim to never be held back by the curveballs which life throws along, but rather embrace the fear, working out how to channel it in a productive way, and running with it.

Education or no education, I feel as though those skills have empowered me the most.

If I can say one thing to employers, it’s to never underestimate anyone who doesn’t meet academic expectation or archetype if they’re willing to learn, because so often that will mean that they’re willing to try, think, be flexible, and work hard — they may be your company’s greatest asset one day.

I’ve seen many people with no formal education do things that are remarkable through sheer grit and determination, and they’re the ones who’re so often the most innovative, resilient, and adaptable team members.

And for you, reader, don’t stop believing in your ability to keep growing, learning, or confront challenges — sometimes just the mental act of being open-minded and curious is enough to get you where you want to go.

The requirement for organisations to better understand their customers’ wants and needs has never been greater.

In modern markets where every industry is flooded with competitors and disruptors, ensuring all of your customer-facing teams are doing their best to not only understand but nurture your customers is critical to retention and sustainability.

However, the greatest part that about things like customer service is that it’s often the little philosophies that have the biggest impact.

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever received is simple, but so often under-utilised:

Want people to talk to you? Ask them questions.

Stating the obvious? Yeah, it may seem so, but in fact, we tend to do it far less that we probably should.

When we’re drowning in tickets, customer interactions, users reviews, or any other source of feedback, it can be so very easy to want to fix the problem they’re having swiftly and to move on immediately to our next task.

Sometimes that means we miss what people are really thinking or feeling.

Even if it’s positive feedback, we may get so excited by receiving it that we miss out on the richness of the provider’s full views.

We shouldn’t let self-imposed time limitations or things that may make us uncomfortable hold us back from exercising our curiosity with the discussions with have with our clients.

Now, I don’t mean we get clingy (‘whatcha thinkin’ ‘bout?’) or that we ask obvious questions (‘so, when you’ve got a problem with your browser, is your computer turned on?’).

Here are 4 helpful examples of how to put this into practice:

If a customer contacts your support channel with an issue with a part of the product or service they’re using, asking “what is your use case?”, if their context isn’t immediately obvious, may be one way to get to understand their situation more clearly, and reach a better outcome to their issue

If they’ve left you positive feedback, asking them “what do you like most about the product or service?” is a great source of positive reinforcement for your product/management team, as well as assets for marketing materials (and maybe, with permission, a sneaky testimonial)

I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve stopped myself from moving on from a conversation quickly, taken the time to ask a question, and have been blown away by the willingness of a customer to talk, and the gems that they’ve shared.

Bear in mind, with great questions comes great responsibility, so be prepared to take the time to talk to the users who take the time with you (within reason, but you’ll know what that looks like for your organisation).

It’ll be worth it though — time that you invest in asking your users questions could be your greatest retention tool.

These guidelines are fairly well designed to ensure the content put out into the stores is relevant, valuable, and not violating any user privacy, security, or so on.

Reading through the expectations of the stores will not only mean you don’t waste your time building something that will just be rejected, but it will also mean that you’re going to have a sleeker app and smoother launch because of it.

Not all rules are there to restrict what you’re allowed to do — some are guidelines are there to ensure you do things right as well.

Who doesn’t want to be successful?

2. Regional Laws

This is where it gets a little interesting. Depending on your region, you may find that there is a greater and greater push for executive-level regulation of the local app economy.

Although there are limitations in power that governments can have (because internet), at the very least you need to be aware of the limitations that may be placed on you under relevant general consumer and privacy laws for where you are located, for which you are entirely accountable.

At least once a month in my role at Appbot I speak with a different group of developers about the rules and restrictions placed upon them based on the industry in which they operate. The most common examples of these have been in the banking and health industries.

Understandably, the risk associated with the data is huge, and the regulations are in place to mitigate the chances of things going wrong in a very public way.

Although your app may not fall into a category with such high risk, it is always good to be mindful of what could implications your app could have. Using that as a jumping off point, you will then be able to look into what industry you may fall into, and potential areas you may need to tighten in your app to ensure it is seamless.

How to make sure you don’t get into trouble

First and foremost, and I can’t stress this enough: don’t do anything outrightly illegal. This is a sure-fire way to not only get yourself banned from the store, but you could get into far greater strife if you go too far down the wrong path. Check yo’self.

Secondly: research, research, research. Google is your best friend, and reading through a few pages of the resources so readily available in the internet will serve as a massive protection. This is something that requires prudence, but the energy you spend on this could serve as a solid safety net for you (and your users) in the future.

Thirdly, if you’re still unclear, contact someone trained in this, like a lawyer with specialisation in internet law or with commercial law experience in your region/industry.

When it comes to creating your app, it’s better to be safe than sorry. Erring on the side of caution can ensure that you proceed with peace of mind knowing you’ll be doing the right thing, and are affording your users the protection that they deserve.

I’ve seen some pretty stellar apps, aaaannnd I’ve seen some pretty messed up apps.

Part of my job is providing meta-analyses of app review data for some of the world’s biggest developers. I’m able to study their reviews at scale, give them (their customer service teams, marketing teams, etc) a chance to understand the trends in their users’ feedback, and to help them ascertain what to do next.

As a result of this work, I’ve been able to see many organisations go through the ebbs and flows of the app world: a bug/issue occurs, the rise of negative feedback, the efforts to address the issue, then the levelling back to baseline once the problems have been dealt with.

I can assure you, it happens to the best of them.

It doesn’t always go to plan though, and I have seen some apps bottom out to the point of their developers shutting their doors. It’s sad when this happens, especially when they’ve exhausted every avenue to keep operations going.

To save you ending up in the app dev graveyard, and to help you recover quickly from a bad patch, I’ve put together a list of what can be done to save yourself. It’s by no means exhaustive, but it aims to provide a rough guideline to follow amidst the panic that may ensue when things suddenly don’t go to plan.

Find the problem(s)

Sometimes the problem is blatantly, and instantly, obvious.

Recently, I saw an app with a huge spike in negative reviews — far more than usual. Turns out, as I isolated my focus on the time frame in question, I saw that the vast majority of reviews left for the app were complaining about a huge update-related issue. It didn’t take a lot of reading to see that the problem was screaming to be heard.

Review Volume and Sentiment Over 6 Months

Then, sometimes the advent of an issue is more pernicious — a low trickle of issues hitting users one by one, just enough to impact their experience, and put them off the app.

I saw this with one company recently who were experiencing a decline in review volume and their rating, but couldn’t work out why. When I took a deeper look at their reviews over time I could see that some users had a bug where they were being asked to update the app when there were none available, and yet they couldn’t proceed in the app without doing so. This happened slowly but surely over time, enough to just fall under the radar — a passive problem, hushed, when there were other matters in the app that elicited greater focus.

It’s not always even about a bug or an update issue — sometimes a feature of the product irks your users, and they wind up frustrated over time.

Regardless of what you choose to research with, ensuring that you’re monitoring your reviews and tracking their evolution is a must if you’re managing reviews at scale. At the very least, if you only get a couple of reviews at a time, simply reading through them as they come through will help you keep tabs on user satisfaction.

2. Prioritise

Sometimes issues can be fixed or tweaks can be made alongside your normal workload. Sometimes things will need to be put on hold to fix an issue. This means time, this means money.

Prioritisation, then, is key. Focus on the biggest issue at hand, and if you have the opportunity to knock out some ‘quick wins’ (easy ‘fix and ship’ issues) while you’re at it, then do them too.

The key here is to not get carried away by the issues that don’t matter.

Don’t completely redesign the app in response to an issue (unless things are really bad), don’t focus on fixing every single issue with your app all at once just for the sake of it, and definitely don’t get carried away by anything that isn’t critical. Use downtime periods for that.

Write a list of steps that need to be taken, determine how much time is needed, work out who needs to address what issue, and then you can begin to actually sort the problem out.

3. Communicate

A big thing you need to remember is to communicate with your team about what has happened, the impact, and what needs to be done, if it has the potential to impact your interaction with them or the ability to reach your deadlines.

If it’s just you, then this is obviously not an issue, but in a bigger team you need to share what is happening with all key stakeholders so that they can make allowances and adjust their expectations accordingly. This is a critical part of prioritisation that people forget to do amidst a fluster — simply talking with their teammates.

Look — you’re going to be stressed, but keeping your cool and thinking of the fix as an ‘unanticipated project’ may be one way to manage the feelings that come with the situation.

Whether it could have been prevented or not, what is done is done, and focus must be on fixing the issue with a clear head, rather than letting the circumstance consume you.

You know what you need to do.

Do so calmly, methodically, and prepare to problem solve your little heart out.

Once complete, send that update out.

5. Reach out

Importantly, you need to tell your customers that you’ve heard them.

Whether it is replying to reviews, as mentioned above, or whether it’s just publishing some comprehensive release notes, you simply must be transparent with your users and make them feel validated and heard, and that you’ve fixed the problem.

If the issue was critical enough, outrightly promoting to your users that you’ve fixed the problem may be the only way they’re actually going to know you’ve fixed it if they’ve already abandoned ship — as such, social media or remarketing may be your best friend.

6. Don’t forget the post mortem

You’ve worked hard now, it’s been frustrating, but you did it!

Go get yourself a doughnut and a coffee.

Important, there are things you must do to move on:

Briefly analyse what went wrong, how to prevent it, how you fixed it, how to maintain the fix, and make sure that you allow it to serve it as a motivator to be extra diligent with your work moving forward.

We ALL need that reminder from time to time. It’s not always your fault, of course. BUT, an extra bit of thought into ensuring things are watertight never hurt anyone.

Provide a summary to your team, if you have one, letting them know (in probably as little detail, but as comprehensively as possible) what happened, how you fixed it, and how you’ll prevent it in the future.

The next step is the most satisfying one: integrate the project into your standard monitoring tools, and commence business as usual.

Alas! You got through it. Maybe with a few battle scars, but you did it. Don’t let it get you down, this is what wisdom is made of.

You’re a dead set legend 🤘

Side note

I should point out that when it comes to UX or UI overhauls in particular, your users are almost ALWAYS going to have issues with them when they first get launched.

The reality is, they may be initially frustrated by having to learn the new ropes, but people often just need time to get used to things.

BUT, what IS an issue is when the app is literally unusable.

Make sure, in preparation for a UX/UI redesign launch that you thoroughly test with objective parties, so you can make sure you’re not hiding any features that are critical to users, making their workflow more clunky, or omitting a critical part of your product for no good reason.

Another good way to check this, and test out workflows is to use an analytics tool like Heap, or the like, to get to know your customer’s workflows and key features, to better inform your decision before acting on it.